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Why Philosophers Disagree

J. J.C. SMART
Published online: 01 Jul 2013.

To cite this article: J. J.C. SMART (1993) Why Philosophers Disagree, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, 23:sup1, 67-82
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Supplementary Volume 19

Why Philosophers Disagree

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J.J.C. SMART

I The Problem
Why is it that philosophers find it so hard to come to agreement?
Many disputes that have gone on for centuries or even millennia are
still unresolved, even though there has been increased conceptual
sophistication on the part of the contending parties. Consider, for
example, the question of free will, where libertarians still contest the
field with determinists and compatibilists (who need not deny quantum mechanical indeterminism at the micro level). Again, the traditional issue between idealists and realists has still its rival proponents,
in particular since the issue has been transmuted into that between
metaphysical realists and anti-realists with regard to truth. Here, too,
the contemporary disputants typically seem as unwilling to give
ground as were their less sophisticated predecessors. Another example is the issue between so-called A-theorists and B-theorists about
time, between process theorists and those who defend a tenseless
space-time view of the universe. Both sides in the various disputes
also have to contend with those who deny that there is a substantive
dispute and in the manner of Wittgenstein1 try to show the fly the way
out of the fly bottle. Unfortunately, most flies remain obstinately
within their chosen bottle. This makes me think that the questions are

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell1953), Section 309

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often substantive after all, even though they cannot be resolved to the
satisfaction of all concerned.
In this respect philosophy contrasts with the sciences, for example,
solid state physics, physical chemistry, geology, biochemistry, genetics, and factual humanities, such as European or Chinese history. In
all these fields there are indeed unsettled disputes, but only against a
vast background of settled agreement.
I should add that my worry about lack of consensus is in relation to
metaphysics and metaphysically relevant theories, such as meta-ethics. In meta-ethics a non-cognitivist theory hangs well with naturalism
(in the ontological sense of this word, not in the sense of the so-called
'naturalistic fallacy' of deducing 'ought' from 'is'). Thus meta-ethical
disputes draw some of their life from metaphysical disputes between
naturalism and more romantic views of the world. It is not at all
surprising to me that consensus cannot be reached in normative ethics
because I contend that ethics is not concerned with what the world is
like but with what to do about the world, and this depends on what
ultimately we desire. Of course ultimate desires can differ. For example, some want welfare and some want rights. Thus normative ethics
partakes of something of the character ofliterary criticism insofar as the
latter depends on taste. (Though- perhaps I am biased- normative
ethics can possess a much more rigorous logical structure.)

II Is Philosophy Too Difficult?

'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' sang Henry Higgins in My
Fair Lady. Why can't philosophy be more like physical chemistry?
Some philosophers have been cheeky enough to say that this is
because philosophy deals with more difficult questions. But do not
the scientists settle extremely difficult questions? It would be interesting to see some of these cheeky philosophers thinking up delicate
chemical experiments or trying to solve mathematical problems in
quantum field theory. In philosophy a bright undergraduate can get
up to or very near to the frontiers of research. Not so in mathematics
and many of the branches of physics and other special sciences. Thus
there is a good sense in which these sciences are more difficult than

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philosophy, and yet they do solve problems and disputes to the

satisfaction of previously contending parties.
So difficulty does not seem to be the explanation of why philosophical questions do not yield agreement in the way that scientific ones
commonly do. Of course it may be that 'difficulty' connotes simply
lack of progress towards agreement. But then it becomes a mere
tautology that lack of agreement is due to the difficulty of philosophical problems. To say that philosophers fail to agree because their
problems are too difficult just becomes the uninformative statement
that philosophers fail to agree because they fail to agree.
I have spoken of philosophers as 'cheeky' when they go on about
philosophy as difficult, at least if they think that philosophy is more
difficult than, or even as difficult as, research into mathematical
physics, molecular biology, or immunology. The relevant difference is
that the practitioners of these special sciences are optimistic about the
prospects of coming to agreement with one another. Nevertheless,
there is perhaps a more respectable reason for saying that philosophy
is difficult: 'Too hard for humans,' as I believe that Iris Murdoch has
said. This may arise from a conception of metaphysics as not wholly an
intellectual pursuit but as something that informs our whole lives.
Quite why this should be demanded of philosophers is unclear to me.
We do not worry too much thatthe great Isaac Newton had a dark and
in some ways evil side to his personality. It is not at all surprising that
moral perfection is too hard for humans. We all have to contend with
the archaic and now ill adaptive neural and hormonal relics of our
evolutionary heritage. So we need not expect even a great philosopher
to be an outstandingly good person, though he or she must of course
have the main intellectual virtues. I am glad that Hume was 'le bon
David' - a thoroughly delightful person, as can be seen from his
modest and beautiful mini-autobiography, written so cheerfully not
long before his anticipated death. Nevertheless, even if he had been a
nasty person, he would surely have been as admirable for his raising of
the problem of induction and other purely intellectual contributions to
philosophy. However, I do not wish to disagree with Iris Murdoch
totally, since the intellectual virtues are to some extent connected with
the moral virtues of modesty and impartiality. In this respect, however,
philosophy does not differ from the special sciences.

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III Comparison with the Sciences

Certainly theoretical physicists are driven by strong emotional attitudes, such as the desire to find symmetries. Their methodology is
dependent on an assumption that the universe is simple. Biological
scientists, on the other hand, are happy to find complexity, since this
is to be expected in organisms that have evolved in an opportunistic
way over hundreds of millions of years. Nevertheless, in the total
scientific culture there is sufficient agreement on methodology. There
is the control of theory by experiment. There is also some control of
experiment by theory, since experimental results are viewed with
suspicion if they are at variance with current theory. In this case, the
experiments may be thoroughly investigated and attempts to repeat
them are made by other scientists.
It is also important to note that the application of science in technology and medicine is so widespread and familiar that pseudo-science must surely find it increasingly hard to flourish among educated
people. Consider for example the way in which even such limited
success as research in artificial intelligence has already achieved is
making spiritualistic explanations in the philosophy of mind look
facile and unbelievable to an increasing number of educated people.
Furthermore, the technological successes of physics as applied to
science itself have a great effect. Consider, for example, the applications to electronics and hence to radio astronomy. It is harder for
educated people now to be quite unaware of the vastness of the
known universe, with (say) a hundred thousand million galaxies each
with (say) a hundred thousand million stars. This must surely weaken
the human tendency to anthropocentricity even though many people
seem to repress these facts from their consciousness.
It is not surprising therefore that in science there is a good deal of
agreement not only on the observations that test theory but on the
methodology of scientific research itself. This leads to a great deal of
agreement about what are at least approximations to the truth about
the universe. This is not to deny that there may be philosophical
disagreements within science, notably, at present, in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Indeed, some physicists have taken
refuge in something very like Berkeley's subjectivism, though it is

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doubtful how much this seriously affects their main work. I also do
not wish to deny that philosophy and science are continuous with one
another. This is not only because in science there is much work of
conceptual clarification which we can recognize as philosophical but
because (so I hold) plausibility in the light of total science is a touchstone of metaphysical truth. Thus I hold that metaphysics is at the
irremediably conjectural end of science.

IV Is Philosophy Circular?
One trouble with philosophy is that philosophers are willing to
question everything, not only the premisses of their arguments but
the very canons of right reasoning and the methodology of argument.
If this is not a recipe for circularity of argument and irresolvable
dispute, what is? It is notable that when we do come across an
argument that is accepted by pretty well all competent philosophers
who consider it carefully, this comes on the edges of philosophy,
where philosophy is liable to break away (or has already broken
away) into some special science, such as mathematical logic, linguistics, or psychology. Another reason why some philosophical arguments may attain something like universal consent is that they occur
in areas where cosmic emotions are not involved.
Thus on one occasion on which I discussed the question of whether
there are any knock down arguments in philosophy it was suggested
to me that a good example of a knock down argument was Gettier's
argument that knowledge cannot be defined as justified true beliee
However, this seems to me to be of interest in connection with the
problem of radical skepticism, and there are in practice no radical
skeptics. (Otherwise the point seems to be of linguistic interest.) In
most philosophical discussions of wide philosophical interest we
could just as well talk not of knowledge but of justified true belief.

2 See Edmund Gettier, 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?' Analysis 25 (1963)
121-3, and subsequent literature.

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There is little metaphysical motivation to look for possible ways of

evading Gettier's arguments: they do not bear one way or another on
emotionally interesting questions to do with our vast universe and
our place in it.
When philosophers differ not only in their premisses but in their
methodology their disagreements can of course be even more irresoluble. After all, some philosophers and logicians have even queried
the law of non-contradiction. 3 Reductio ad absurdum may well be
powerless against such a philosopher. However, I think that the most
important methodological difference lies in the importance that philosophers attach to phenomenology (taking this in the general sense
of attention to prima facie appearance, not in the more technical sense
in which the word 'phenomenology' is used in European philosophy). I myself attach almost no importance to phenomenology.
Thus it does seem to people that time flows. I hold that this is an
illusion. If time flows, how fast does it flow? If our consciousness
advances up the world line of our body,4 is its speed up the world line
a rate of change with respect to a hyper-time? If you and I are moving
relative to one another, so that our world lines are not parallel, is your
hyper-time the same as my hyper-time? And is rate of change something that is with respect to a hyper-time and so on ad infinitum, as
J.W. Dunne thought?5 I take these questions to indicate the absurdity
of our notion of the flow of time or of our advance through time. It
may seem that time flows, but I take this to be some sort of metaphysical illusion born of confusion. One, though not the only, consideration
here is that we must recognize that tenses and words such as 'past,'
'present,' and 'future' are indexical, much as 'here' is, and we do not
think that space flows. Why the illusion in the case of time? I am more

3 G. Priest, R. Routley and J. Norman, eds., Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the

Inconsistent (Miinchen: Philosophia 1989)
4 A.S. Eddington, Space, Time amd Gravitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 1920), 51
5 An Experiment with Time, new ed. (London: Faber and Faber 1939)

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clear in my mind that the flow of time is an illusion than I am about

the source of the illusion. Perhaps it is that we confuse a flow of
information through our short term memory with a flow of time
itsel. 6
In denying the flow of time I do not of course deny the fact of
change. I take change to be the differing in some respect of a later
temporal stage of a thing (or the universe at large) from an earlier
temporal stage of it. For this reason I once thought that I had a knock
down argument against the idea that one can change the future. I do
not think that one can change the future any more than one can change
the past. The argument is simple? Suppose that I say that I am going
to change the future. I say to myself 'I will lift my left hand or I will
lift my right hand.' I decide to lift my left hand. Have I changed the
future? No -lifting my left hand was the future. Well, that argument
looked knock down to me. Peter Geach, however, has found the
argument so far from knock down as to be merely comical. 8 For him,
the future is to be explicated in terms of present tendencies. This raises
questions of free will and determinism, as to whether or not my
decision at a certain time arises out of tendencies at that time, but for
present purposes this complication can be ignored. I can of course
agree that we can change tendencies; for example, changing the state
of magnetization of a bar of iron changes its tendency to attract or
repel another magnet. It seems to me to be possible and indeed true
that there may be purely random events that are not determined by
earlier tendencies. Nevertheless, such events in the future are perfectly real- there they are up ahead of us in Minkowski space-time.
To elucidate the future in terms of present tendencies seems to me to
be rather like Dummettian anti-realism, where truth is elucidated

6 See my Essays Metaphysical and Moral (Oxford: Blackwell1987).

7 See Smart, ed., Problems of Space and Time (New York: Macmillan 1964), Introduction, 20.

8 Providence and Evil: The Stanton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press 1977), 52

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more or less in terms of warranted assertibility. Geach, however, is a

realist about truth. His difference from me lies in the fact that he has
a tensed view of it.
Geach regarded my argument as comical because I use a premiss
that he rejects. Because of his tensed view of truth he can deny that
my lifting my left hand was the future. It of course becomes a present
truth when I lift the hand. I reject this tensed view of propositions and
of truth. As Davidson does, I give the semantics of tensed language
in a tenseless metalanguage. If E occurs (tenseless) at some time later
than t then the utterance at t of 'E will occur' is (tenseless) true. This
has absolutely nothing to do, one way or the other, with what tendencies there are at the time of utterance.
It thus now seems to me that in arguing with Geach, my argument
comes out as circular. Nevertheless, his argument against me is
circular too. Now one thing (among many others) for which I admire
Geach is his robust faith in human reason. So I guess that he holds
that there is some knock down argument to be found so that if he and
I discussed the matter long enough we could be brought to agreement. (Unless perhaps my participation in original sin blinds me or has already blinded me- to what should be obvious truth.) My
thesis in the present paper is that there are rarely knock down arguments in philosophy and that there is a sense in which important
philosophical arguments are indeed ultimately circular. Despite this,
however, I do hold that unless a philosophical thesis is nonsensical,
which is not as often the case as many of us used to believe forty or
fifty years ago, there is a truth of the matter. One of the contending
parties is right and the other is wrong. Perhaps there could be a
compromise between Geach and me if we were to agree that the idiom
'change the future' just means 'change present tendencies.' It seems
obvious, however, that there is more between us than this merely
verbal matter. For example, Geach refers (though in a different connection) to Arthur Prior's article 'Opposite Number,' 9 in the final

9 In A.N. Prior, Essays on Logic and Ethics (London: Duckworth 1976)

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paragraph of which Prior says that he cannot take the existence of an

unknown and perhaps unknowable future event seriously and that
he is disposed to be positivist here. Thus we do have to involve
ourselves in the debate between realism and anti-realism. This brings
out an important characteristic of philosophical disagreements: the
argument spreads out and involves itself in a lot of other disagreements in a way that is not normally characteristic of physics or
biology. Because a philosopher may be willing to question anything,
disagreement tends to have a holistic character.

V Two More Examples

I shall give two more examples of what at first sight seemed to

me (in my naivete) to be knock down arguments but which turned
out not to be so. With the first one I shall be brief because I have
gone into greater detail elsewhere. 10 A knock down argument
against libertarianism seemed to be a version of Hume's Fork. Let
us define pure chance as the negation of determinism. That is, an
event occurs by pure chance if it is not a model theoretic consequence
of some previous time slice of the universe. Since being determined
in this sense and being a pure chance occurrence are contradictories,
logic leaves no room for another possibility, acting from libertarian
free will. The libertarian wants to say that a free action neither is
determined by a previous state of the universe nor is a bit of pure
chance. After all, we could hardly be held responsible for an action
if it just popped out randomly. So libertarian free will is impossible.
Let us call people who oppose libertarians in this sort of way

10 See my 'Philosophy and Scientific Plausibility,' in Paul K. Feyerabend and

Grover Maxwell, eds., Mind, Matter and Method: Essays in Honor of Herbert Feigl
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1966) and 'My Semantic
Ascents and Descents,' in Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell, eds., The Owl
of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill1975); and see
also C.A. Campbell, 'Is "Free-Will" a Pseudo-Problem?' Mind 60 (1951) 441-65
and 'Professor Smart on Free-Will, Praise and Blame,' Mind 72 (1963) 400-5.

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'anti-libertarians.' This term will cover hard and soft determinists

and those who allow (because of quantum mechanics) that the
universe is indeterministic but approximates to determinism on the
macro-level. The anti-libertarian may analyze free will in a way
that makes it compatible with determinism and thus may hold,
with R.E. Hobart, that we have free will only to the extent that
determinism is an approximation to the truth about the way in
which our minds or brains work. 11 Now, as I was soon to discover
even before I saw C.A. Campbell's good reply to me ('Professor
Smart on Free-Will, Praise and Blame'), the libertarian will evade
such a hopeful attempt at a knock down argument. The libertarian
will say that the negation of determinism is not pure chance but
is the disjunction of this and acting from libertarian free will.
An anti-libertarian will, of course, feel baffled because he or she will
fail to understand what a libertarian free will (or 'contra-causal freedom,' as Campbell called it) could possibly be. The anti-libertarian's
application of Hume's Fork may be circular, but the libertarian's reply
may seem to be dependent on an assertion of the meaningfulness of
something to which the anti-libertarian can give no consistent meaning.
Something has been achieved, however. The argument has been
shifted from its original metaphysical context to that of the philosophy of language. The libertarian may appeal (as Campbell does)
to introspection in order to give meaning to the notion of contracausal freedom. In reply, the anti-libertarian may give Wittgensteinian arguments against the possibility of giving meaning to words
in this sort of way. No doubt the libertarian will refuse to accept
one or other of the premisses of this sort of argument about meaning.
Once more, we are up against the holistic character of the justification
of philosophical theses. This problem also arises if the anti-libertarian
appeals, as I have done, to plausibility in the light of total science.
Even if the notion of libertarian free will made sense, how could

11 R.E. Hobart, 'Free-Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without

It,' Mind 43 (1934) 1-27

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such an entity have arisen by the mechanistic process of the neoDarwinian theory of natural selection? The libertarian will object
to this argument as being 'scientistic' and will be unimpressed.
Once more the dispute has been shifted to another area, and the
holistic character of philosophical debate will once more become
evident.
Another example of irresolvable dispute may come from the
present debate between metaphysical realists and metaphysical antirealists. Consider Putnam's model theoretic argument that any
theory can be interpreted in various ways. The metaphysical realist
may reply with a causal theory of reference that explains reference
to the one real world. Putnam replies that this is 'just more theory.'
The theory of reference can itself be reinterpreted. The realist will
reply with the assertion that we can refer without having a theory
of reference. The anti-realist will demand a theory of reference of
the augmented theory that includes the theory of reference about
the first theory. The realist will reply again in the same way. Every
odd time the anti-realist wins and every even time the realist wins.
The dispute seems to end in a draw. 12 Recently, Barry Taylor13 has
produced a modification of Putnam's argument which is more
difficult to answer, but it seems likely that the realist can still
achieve a draw. (Here I am indebted to correspondence with David
Lewis.) Similarly, it is hard for Dummettian anti-realists and metaphysical realists to resolve their disagreement. The realist will at
first point to Tarski's theory of truth, which gives meaning to saying
that a sentence is true irrespective of whether it is provable or
warrantedly assertible. The anti-realist will point out that Tarski
uses the law of excluded middle in the meta-language, and will
say that all the valuable part of Tarski's theory, namely its showing

12 Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984);
David Lewis, 'Putnam's Paradox,' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (1984)
221-36; J.J .C. Smart, Review of Putnam's Realism and Reason, Australasian Journal
of Philosophy 63 (1985), 533-5
13 'Just More Theory,' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (1991) 152-66

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that the notion of truth is recursive, can be retained if the connectives

of Tarski's theory are interpreted intuitionistically. 14 The realist may
be reduced to adopting a suggestion of Thomas Baldwin, that we
take the law of excluded middle as a metaphysical axiom. 15 The
metaphysical realist will of course regard this axiom as plausible,
and think that Putnamian and Dummettian anti-realists have lost
contact with the real world. Of course this will be denied by the
anti-realists, who may not give sense to the notion of the metaphysical realist's 'real world.'

VI Metaphysics and Emotion

I cannot help believing that our emotions have something to do with
the interminability of many metaphysical disputes. This is not to say
that what we should believe is a mere matter of taste. We should, if
possible, believe what is true. Suppose that Joe is worried about
whether some distant event has occurred. Wishful thinking or fearful
thinking may bias his tendency to believe one way or the other.
Nevertheless, there is an objective fact of the matter. Since metaphysics is so much less under empirical control than are the various
physical and biological sciences this possibility of emotional bias of
our tendencies to believe may be quite important in philosophy.
To revert to a general topic on which I have touched earlier in this
paper, consider the ongoing debate between so-called A-theorists
about time, among whom Arthur Prior and Peter Geach may be cited
as prominent examples, and B-theorists about time, who espouse a
tenseless metaphysical vocabulary, and indeed deny the separate
existence of space and time and hold that in reality there is only
space-time. (Quine is a prominent example of such theorists.) I am

14 See Neil Tennant, Anti-Realism and Logic: Truth as Eternal (Oxford: Clarendon
1987).
15 See my 'Verificationism,' in John Heil, ed., Cause, Mind and Reality: Essays
Honoring C. B. Martin (Dordrecht: Kluwer 1989).

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myself a passionate B-theorist. It goes well with my scientific realism.

Minkowski space-time has so much explanatory value (e.g., it explains the Lorentz transformations as a mere rotation of axes) that we
ought to believe in it, or rather in its generalization to the space-time
of variable curvature of general relativity which has even greater
explanatory value, since it explains gravitation.
The typical A-theorist will take an instrumentalist view of spacetime and compare it with graphs. The A-theorist will have some
problem in fitting in his or her idea of past, present, and future into
special relativity since the relativity of simultaneity seems to go
against the notion of a universal flow of time. There are ways in which
he or she can deal with this problem. It makes the A-theory more
complicated. For example the A-theorist could take simultaneity to
be relative to a frame of reference in which the cosmic background
radiation is equal in all directions. Because of the expansion of the
universe this direction will be different at different points of spacetime. Perhaps the A-theorist could say that time advances as a curved
hyper-surface in space-time, though he or she would probably object
to the realism about space-time in the way that I have put the matter.
The A-theory becomes rather complicated but I think that the A-theorist is so wedded to the notion of the flow of time and the phenomenology of it that he or she will put up with the complications.
I think that the issue between A-theorists and B-theorists is one in
which our emotions are peculiarly involved. I must say that I myself
have a strong, passionate desire to see the world sub specie eternitatis,
which not only goes with a desire to eliminate anthropocentric perspectives from metaphysics but also goes with a desire to avoid
indexical expressions such as 'you,' 'me,' 'here,' 'past,' 'present,'
'future,' and also tenses. Also, it is likely that strong emotions are
associated with A-theory. 16 There is a bit of anti-realism here, too. See
here a very moving passage that Arthur Prior quotes from
Lukasiewicz, in which Lukasiewicz says that all our misdeeds and

16 A.N. Prior, Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Clarendon 1967)

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errors in the past will cease to exist when all traces of them have
vanished. This passage was read at Prior's memorial service. 17 Prior
was such a good and admirable person that he surely had little that
he should have regretted.
Rightly or wrongly, I have associated A-theorists with a romantic
metaphysical temperament and B-theorists with a classical metaphysical temperament. (I keep my romanticism for such things as Sir
Walter Scott and the Waverley novels. One good thing about Scott is
that he keeps metaphysics out of his story telling.) There are probably
plenty of exceptions to this surmise of mine and indeed so strongly
individual a personality as that of Peter Geach surely resists so facile
a classification. Nevertheless, C.D. Broad puzzled me. His style of
writing seemed to me to exude a classical eighteenth-century sort of
flavor, very much classical rather than romantic in style, and yet after
an early writing, that on 'Time' 18 when he was a good B-theorist, he
became very much an A-theorist or espouser of a 'process' view of
time. The change in his views also puzzled C.W.K. Mundle. 19 I was
less puzzled when I read Broad's autobiography0 and discovered his
pleasure as a small boy in dressing up in Viking costume, his later
continuing Nordic interest, and how he never could believe that there
were not aspects of the universe about which orthodox science could
tell us nothing. In his reply to his critics, Broad remarked, surprisingly, that he had forgotten about his early article. 21 It is of course a
matter for conjecture as to whether or how much this forgetfulness
may have been due to temperamental factors.

17 See Anthony Kenny, 'Arthur Norman Prior 1914-1969,' Proceedings of the British
Academy 56 (1970), 349.
18 In James Hastings, et al., eds., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics vol. 1?. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark 1921).
19 Mundle, 'Broad's Views About Time,' in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy ofC.D.
Broad (New York: Tudor 1959)
20 Broad, 'Autobiography,' in Schilpp
21 Broad, 'A Reply to my Critics,' in Schilpp, 765; see also his' Autobiography,' 58.

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VII Conclusions and Suggestions

I have suggested that intractable disputes in metaphysics persist for
three main reasons: (1) metaphysical theories are further removed
from control by experiment and observation than are typical scientific
theories (even though, as I think, this is a difference in degree rather
than kind); (2) philosophers may disagree not only in their subjective
assessments of probability, but even in their logic and methodology,
and what one will take as a simple consequence of accepted premisses
the other will take as a reductio of one of these premisses; (3) some of
the differences in subjective assessments of the plausibility of premisses may be due to temperamental differences. This subjectivity
should not be taken to imply that there is no objective truth in
metaphysics. It merely implies that we cannot get philosophers to
agree on what it is. (Here, of course, I have just said something on
which I do not expect to get universal agreement!)
Even though we cannot get agreement among competent philosophers, even within the same analytic and scientific tradition, it is
surely well worth while to try to clarify the metaphysical issues and
to get agreement at least between like minded philosophers. It is
noteworthy how at a university seminar, for example, a paper may
be convincing to all those present. If we cannot totally assuage our
thirst for metaphysical certainty, we can at least try to find out what,
according to our own background beliefs and canons of plausibility,
is the most acceptable view. Advances in science can also help. For
example, the development of topology has transformed the question
of whether there could be anything before time began.
If there came to be widespread agreement about a metaphysical
thesis, would we consider the thesis to be still a metaphysical one?
Perhaps when a philosophical dispute has been settled it has become
part of a special science. (This point was put to me forcibly by Hugh
Mellor and I think that Bertrand Russell held a similar view.) Psychology, mathematical logic, and linguistics have largely hived themselves off from philosophy. Perhaps philosophy continues to be
controversial for the same reason that treason never prospers. If it
prospered, it would cease to be called 'treason' and would become a
glorious revolution. When philosophical discourse ceases to be con-

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troversial it ceases to be called 'philosophy.' The worry then may be

that this transformation of philosophy does not occur so often as we
should hope that it might.
Despite intractable disagreements there does seem to be progress
in philosophy. If we look at a copy of Mind or The Journal of Philosophy
and compare it with one of a hundred, or fifty, or perhaps only
twenty-five years ago, we may sense a general increase in technique,
sophistication, and clarity, though not always in literary elegance or
in aversion to fence sitting. A lot of modern work on the philosophy
of language could not have been done before logicians clarified the
notion of recursiveness and Tarski clarified the notion of truth. The
question of determinism has been clarified in different ways by
quantum mechanics and model theory in logic. 22 Clarity about meanings (or the absence of them) comes very much from the work of
Frege, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Quine, and others. There is also widespread agreement on some meta-issues; for example, that various
influential arguments by eminent philosophers of the past do not by
today's lights look sound, even though there still may be controversy
about the theses that these arguments were meant to establish.
Of course not all meta-issues are such that most philosophers will
agree about them. This paper is concerned with meta-issues and I do
not anticipate widespread agreement with it. Indeed, I still feel puzzlement about the question I have tried to answer.

22 See John Earman, A Primer on Determinism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1986), for

example.

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